KnightExemplar wrote:As for whether or not Storage Spaces can do it... I don't think so. But resizing after the fact seems redundant in the face of just thin-provisioning a 100 TB storage space and never worrying about it again.

My concern about that is that it's a leaky abstraction, because you don't have that much space. (And it's not just a "go deal with this slider bar" to get it -- you have to go out and pay money and wait.) A small part of the reason that I partition stuff up as I do is that it helps me control how much space I use for certain tasks.

The other thing that I'd be a little concerned about is that I have three drives with three very different performance profiles (I have an SSD, a 7200 rpm drive, and a large green drive), and what things I put on what physical drive is a deliberate decision. If all you can do is say "put these things in some place on these physical drives", it's also not suitable for my uses.

EDIT: as for USB 3.0... 190MB/s flash drives are pretty nice. Yeah... an external flash drive that beats all mechanical hard drives in read speed for $25 bucks. I haven't used it yet, but if I ever use the Windows To Go feature in Windows 8... I'm probably gonna do it on a USB 3.0 drive. Actually, because Windows Enterprise is so expensive, I probably won't be doing that. But still... looks awesome.

Jeff Atwood talked about probably a similar fast thumb drive not so long ago, and I was impressed. I actually don't care about the improvements in read speed as much as fast write speeds; even though you read more than write, in my experience reads tend to already be fast enough to not be so annoying (at least for what I use thumb drives for), while you go to copy a fair bit of data to a flash drive and it can take 20 or 30 minutes.

It is possible though that having a drive with both fast read and fast write will make new uses realistic -- e.g. the Windows to Go.

Steax wrote:This was far less of a surprise for me than the native USB 3/ISO mounting/Bluetooth support, though. For those, I didn't intend to mean "OS X had it first!" - I meant more along the lines of "I thought it was commonplace technology since the other major commercial desktop OS has had it for a while, and I've seen it used everywhere so I thought it was native."

USB 3.0 was relatively new on the scene when Win7 was released (wikipedia says USB 3 was "designed" Nov '08, so less than a year old), and it actually seems like it hasn't been on Macs for all that long -- this page (under the "products effected" in the upper right) seems to indicate it's a very recent addition to Macs as well. So USB 3 support at least seems like MS isn't really behind by fair measures.

Bluetooth and ISO mounting are a different story though; I've long thought that MS should include ISO mounting. At this point it's an "it's about time" feature. I'm not sure what the story is with Bluetooth; Apple seems to have had some support for it for ages, but I don't know if it's full support, and I also don't know whether it's been the case that it's only recently been added to chipsets commonly used for Windows boxes or something like that.

So what does being native actually afford you, then? What would the 15-second pitch be?

For me it'd be (1) one less thing to install and (2) fewer parties to trust. (Especially because it's not just an "well, I mostly trust the third-party person putting out a virtual CD drive, it's a "I'm installing a driver from them which could do anything.")

Its an issue of responsibility, especially because Windows is designed to be used across multiple vendors.

Whereas before, if USB 3.0 failed on Windows 7... that would be your motherboard's problem. (or perhaps Dell's problem, if you bought your computer from Dell). It was the responsibility of the OEM to have functioning drivers that may or may not crash your system. There was no "Microsoft Windows 7 USB 3.0" team. In Windows 8, the Microsoft team has taken initiative and responsibility. This means that USB 3.0 problems (or lack thereof) will be more consistent across all machines. Differences will exist of course (AMD chips have one USB driver, while Intel ships with another), but the buck stops at Microsoft now.

Jeff Atwood talked about probably a similar fast thumb drive not so long ago, and I was impressed. I actually don't care about the improvements in read speed as much as fast write speeds; even though you read more than write, in my experience reads tend to already be fast enough to not be so annoying (at least for what I use thumb drives for), while you go to copy a fair bit of data to a flash drive and it can take 20 or 30 minutes.

The write speeds on that particular drive are still higher than what USB 2.0 supports. But they aren't nearly as impressive as the 190 MB/s read speed. The 16GB model "only" supports 55 MB/s. The 32 GB model is 110 MB/s, and the 64 GB model has 170MB/s write speeds. Though, the 64 GB model has been reported to have reliability issues. http://www.everythingusb.com/sandisk-ex ... 21622.html

In comparison, USB 2.0 is stuck with ~60MB/s... and slows down when other USB devices are eating up the bus time. Practically speaking, USB 2.0 hard drives only are in the ~40 MB/s range. So yeah... even the cheaper 16GB Sandisk model 55 MB/s is pretty damn good compared to before.

Bluetooth and ISO mounting are a different story though; I've long thought that MS should include ISO mounting. At this point it's an "it's about time" feature. I'm not sure what the story is with Bluetooth; Apple seems to have had some support for it for ages, but I don't know if it's full support, and I also don't know whether it's been the case that it's only recently been added to chipsets commonly used for Windows boxes or something like that.

I did some search into it, and I think I'm confused. It looks like its "Bluetooth low energy" that Windows 8 is supporting, which is the new Bluetooth standard. Apparently Windows Vista supported Bluetooth, so I'm definitely screwing things up.

KnightExemplar wrote:It seems to me that Microsoft is doing a really poor job at marketing the new features in Windows 8. For $40 you get...

* Native ISO Mounting* Native USB3.0 support* Native Bluetooth support* Storage Spaces (thin provisioning of your disk space across a span of disks)* File History (Window's response to Apple's "Time Machine"). Did you screw up your essay too much and want to revert to your essay from an hour ago? Just click on File History and pull back the file from an hour ago!

No seriously, what the hell is this "no new features" crap that I keep hearing about? With the $40 Windows Pro upgrade, you get other infrastructure changes like NUMA support in process manager and Hyper-V Virtualization for free too. Enterprise gets Windows to Go. But of all the new features... I'm certain everyone can use Storage Spaces and File History.

The native apps are also useful. Windows 8 has a native PDF, mail, and calendar app. Outlook is probably superior, but it was very very easy to get my mail / calendar / contacts all synced up to my Android phone. I just typed in my gmail account and it was done across the entire OS. I've been pretty pleased with the live-tiles on calendar / mail as well. I can check if I have new messages by just tapping the "windows" key to get to the start screen. And Windows 8 notifications alert me whenever I get a new email / have an appointment.

None of those 5 things you listed sound like particularly useful new features for me. I'm really confused as to why you think Storage Spaces would be of any interest. I read your Ars article, but it makes no sense to me. Native ISO mounting? Worthless to me. USB 3.0? How is it different from any other version of USB? I don't notice any delay between typing on my keyboard and it registering on the screen, I don't see how a faster connection would be useful. Bluetooth? I have no bluetooth items, nor do I ever plan to. File history? Never once in my life have I ever said to myself "I wish I could recover the version of that document from an hour ago." Never.

Native PDF? Adobe has always worked fine for me. Mail and calendar? It's all on my iPhone.

Again, this is all just extra stuff I'd need to work around.

broken_escalator wrote:The Mako is powered by the rage of the physics it denies.

Jack21222 wrote:USB 3.0? How is it different from any other version of USB? I don't notice any delay between typing on my keyboard and it registering on the screen, I don't see how a faster connection would be useful.

Do you ever plug in an external hard drive? Flash drive? KnightExemplar already linked to a USB flash drive that has read/write speeds faster than USB 2.

Again, this is all just extra stuff I'd need to work around.

No it isn't, it's just stuff you'd completely ignore. What kind of video card do you have? I'll assume you have an ATI, but if not you can just change the names around. Does the fact that Windows 7 ships with support for nVidia cards mean you have to work around that?

Of course not, you just ignore it. Just like you'd ignore everything on that list if you don't care.

Unlike, subjectively, the new start menu, none of those things will negatively impact your computer-using experience; they'll just fail to add to it. (Well, maybe you'll have to tell Windows to open with Adobe Reader if that's what you want.) (Also, just to be clear, I don't actually dislike the new start menu apart from my minor complaint before about a non-unified programs and settings search (for which KnightExemplar's very helpful reply mitigates, but does not eliminate, the annoyance) which is made up for in other respects; I'm actually remarkably apathetic. Ever since Vista I've launched 99% of what I want via typing what I want, and that continues to work, so I'm happy.)

USB 3.0 in itself is a huge thing - I love the speeds, and Thunderbolt isn't common enough yet.

EvanED wrote:USB 3.0 was relatively new on the scene when Win7 was released (wikipedia says USB 3 was "designed" Nov '08, so less than a year old), and it actually seems like it hasn't been on Macs for all that long -- this page (under the "products effected" in the upper right) seems to indicate it's a very recent addition to Macs as well. So USB 3 support at least seems like MS isn't really behind by fair measures.

Bluetooth and ISO mounting are a different story though; I've long thought that MS should include ISO mounting. At this point it's an "it's about time" feature. I'm not sure what the story is with Bluetooth; Apple seems to have had some support for it for ages, but I don't know if it's full support, and I also don't know whether it's been the case that it's only recently been added to chipsets commonly used for Windows boxes or something like that.

So what does being native actually afford you, then? What would the 15-second pitch be?

For me it'd be (1) one less thing to install and (2) fewer parties to trust. (Especially because it's not just an "well, I mostly trust the third-party person putting out a virtual CD drive, it's a "I'm installing a driver from them which could do anything.")

That's true - OS X support is also new. I just 'thought' Windows would have it earlier because I've been seeing USB 3.0 devices there for a while back.

I'm not sure if laypeople would buy that argument about being native, though, especially since most people are more than happy to just use whatever the hell a random computer assembly shop sells them. It's a shame these kinds of features aren't being marketed properly, or they'd actually be really interesting.

In general, it's as if Microsoft skipped the general notion that the interface is the application: If you're going to push that Modern UI thing, everyone won't give a second look at the desktop (it's compounded by the fact that much of the tech media, and some of Microsoft, are quick to say "don't worry, we still have the Windows 7 desktop"). They really need to push these actual, practical features.

Definitely. It's good to hear that there have been some improvements that don't have to do with tiles. (Although the visual stuff is certainly the noticeable stuff, and even the new UI theme in the desktop takes me by surprise every time I see a screenshot. So damned clean.)

So much depends upon a red wheel barrow (>= XXII) but it is not going to be installed.

Jack21222 wrote:USB 3.0? How is it different from any other version of USB? I don't notice any delay between typing on my keyboard and it registering on the screen, I don't see how a faster connection would be useful.

Do you ever plug in an external hard drive? Flash drive? KnightExemplar already linked to a USB flash drive that has read/write speeds faster than USB 2.

Hell. Not only is it faster than USB2, its faster than all standard hard drives in both random and sequential read speed. The fastest "standard" hard drive right now is the 3 TB Barracuda, which is capping out at ~140 MB/s on sequential read/write speed... which is far below the 64GB Sandisk Extreme's benchmark write speed of 170 MB/s. So technically, if you don't have a SSD / Hybrid SSD when you're copying to the Sandisk Extreme 64GB... its your hard drive that will slow down the process. Its kinda hard to hate on USB 3.0, its definitely a progression of technology that we need now that devices communicate to the PC so often.

No, I don't. I mean, I've occasionally used a flash drive to transfer a powerpoint presentation, but that takes approximately 500 milliseconds to transfer. I don't think reducing that to 250 milliseconds will have any impact on my life. And that's assuming that Windows 7 is incapable of using USB 3, which I'm not even sure that's the case.

broken_escalator wrote:The Mako is powered by the rage of the physics it denies.

Though I absolutely agree that USB 3.0 is both good and necessary, I can say that most people I've met never really cared. Most of them never even touch files that big - sans DVDs and such, which uses their DVD drive anyway. And they're used to just letting things sit for a few hours when they need to, say, backup their whole computer. I think this was why when Thunderbolt was introduced, Apple was busy touting the "daisy-chain 2 large displays from your laptop, plus an external drive or camera!" thing instead of just raw speeds.

I still think USB 3.0 really useful. Firewire never caught on enough for practical use for me, and Thunderbolt is still rare, so it's good for USB 3.0 to catch up. Besides, it's still backwards-compatible and all that.

Steax wrote:Though I absolutely agree that USB 3.0 is both good and necessary, I can say that most people I've met never really cared. Most of them never even touch files that big - sans DVDs and such, which uses their DVD drive anyway. And they're used to just letting things sit for a few hours when they need to, say, backup their whole computer. I think this was why when Thunderbolt was introduced, Apple was busy touting the "daisy-chain 2 large displays from your laptop, plus an external drive or camera!" thing instead of just raw speeds.

Sometimes I just feel out of place. The whole daisy-chain thing means next-to-nothing to me, but it's not all that uncommon that I need to transfer hundreds of MB up to several GB over USB, so having a faster connection and a faster drive would be nice. A month or two ago I was moving a grand total of about 20 GB across between two computers, alternating between two drives (my biggest USB flash drive is 8 GB) to speed up the process. IIRC, writing out 8 GB to that took 15 or 20 minutes.

I think some of us just aren't the norm for "normal people". I've seen people bring their desktops in for "repairs" just so the computer guy will move all their files to a new drive, "because I'm afraid I'll miss some files or corrupt them." :p

And the daisy-chain thing is also kind of moot for me, because it only work for devices with 2 ports, and that can be hard to get... I was just contrasting the different approaches.

I have occasionally used a USB stick to transfer anime episodes. It can take awhile and I wouldn't mind being able to do it faster. Although these days I usually transfer my files wirelessly, if I'm at home.

Steax wrote:Though I absolutely agree that USB 3.0 is both good and necessary, I can say that most people I've met never really cared. Most of them never even touch files that big - sans DVDs and such, which uses their DVD drive anyway. And they're used to just letting things sit for a few hours when they need to, say, backup their whole computer. I think this was why when Thunderbolt was introduced, Apple was busy touting the "daisy-chain 2 large displays from your laptop, plus an external drive or camera!" thing instead of just raw speeds.

Sometimes I just feel out of place. The whole daisy-chain thing means next-to-nothing to me, but it's not all that uncommon that I need to transfer hundreds of MB up to several GB over USB, so having a faster connection and a faster drive would be nice. A month or two ago I was moving a grand total of about 20 GB across between two computers, alternating between two drives (my biggest USB flash drive is 8 GB) to speed up the process. IIRC, writing out 8 GB to that took 15 or 20 minutes.

Maybe I'll build a new computer in a few months or something.

Why not use an Ethernet cable? Most NICs support Gigabit ethernet now, even the cheap ones. All modern NICs I've worked with automatically detect straight-through vs crossover cables, so you don't even need a special crossover cable anymore. Just a standard ethernet cable connecting the two machines up. If that doesn't work, a wireless Ad-hoc network will probably be faster than USB sticks as well.

On the software side, if you're transfering between two Windows machines, just set up a network share and copy/paste files between the two computers. "Share this folder", and then type into windows explorer \\NameOfComputer\, and log in to view the shared folders of that Windows computer. If one of the machines is Linux / Mac OSX, then you can easily set up FTP for the transfer. (or Samba to talk on the Windows protocol). If both machines are *NIX, you can use rsync or scp.

However, I must caveat this by saying that I am using it on a laptop. It's obnoxious and gets in the way of various workflows that had become muscle memory in early editions of windows, and of course, I do not use the panel of buttons at all, not having a touch screen. Takes up the entire screen for far too few options...no reason for it when I have a desktop. Now, on a touchpad, fewer, larger buttons make more sense than with a mouse and keyboard. So, it might be quite a bit better on that form factor.

USB 3 is nice, but I do wish I didn't have to put up with the annoyances of the interface changes to get it. Sure, I know I can(and have) find fixes for lots of the changes, but it's an annoyance.

I have windows 8 on my laptop and there not much difference from windows 7, I have Classic Shell and only see the metro screen in weird ALT-TAB glitches. With classic shell windows 8 is usable, it still can't run some games but overall it isn't as horrible as people say it is.. Oh and you can't run the VM software without pro edition of windows 8. Overall I'd say it's only 99% bad.

I very rarely see the metro screen because I pin my applications I actually use on the taskbar, like a good Windows 7 minion. When I go into the start screen, I type 3 letters of what I want and hit enter, once again just like Windows 7.

One of the things that makes desktop usage intuitive is that it is structured to mimic a real physical desktop. Windows are physical things which can be moved around and stacked on top of eachother. Things are organized into folders and drawers which can intuitively be navigated while giving a sense of organization. Even if you don't know where a setting is or what it is named, it is easy to poke around and find it because of the structure.

If I want to add a printer: Start>hardware>add printer.

Windows 8 throws all of that away and haphazardly mixes everything together. Everything is flat and impossible to find and has no structure. If you don't already explicitly know the name of a setting you want, you can't use the search bar to find it.

eternalfrost wrote:One of the things that makes desktop usage intuitive is that it is structured to mimic a real physical desktop. Windows are physical things which can be moved around and stacked on top of eachother.

What kind of magic real-world physical windows are you used to?

Things are organized into folders and drawers which can intuitively be navigated while giving a sense of organization. Even if you don't know where a setting is or what it is named, it is easy to poke around and find it because of the structure.

Windows 8 just changed the organization, much like how WinXP -> Win Vista changed the location of various folders or whatnot.

Windows 8 throws all of that away and haphazardly mixes everything together. Everything is flat and impossible to find and has no structure. If you don't already explicitly know the name of a setting you want, you can't use the search bar to find it.

Did the control panel disappear or something? It still there in Win8 Settings, as well as the "right click bottom-left corner" trick if you want to get there faster, and can also be searched from the searchbar (win -> "control panel"). No less than three different ways of accessing it.

I understand not being able to use an OS when it came out a few years ago. But come on man, its been like three years. You could have learned the new location of "Control Panel" by now. Beyond that, Control Panel has all of the old controls still available, and looks exactly like Win7.

eternalfrost wrote:If you don't already explicitly know the name of a setting you want, you can't use the search bar to find it.

Going to be the obnoxious Ubuntu Unity fan and say that fuzzy searching is the bomb for this sort of thing. Start to type mon... and Displays comes up, because Displays is tagged with "monitors" somewhere. Works in the Alt menus for applications, too. Love it.

While I'm at it, I love big, shiny start screens with big, friendly buttons. You can't be interacting with anything else on the screen while you're in the apps menu, so why not make use of the screen space? And having my recent files listed right under my most-used applications before I start typing ... it's handy. All the benefits of a horribly disorganized mess of a desktop, yet I keep my wallpaper clean.

So much depends upon a red wheel barrow (>= XXII) but it is not going to be installed.

Over the last year I've had two machines that are Win8, and I feel it is the worst. Half of the applications I run in WinXP don't operate quite right, forgetting startup preferences or the like, and I find the whole app loading template to be obnoxious and clunky. I spend 99% of my time in desktop mode, and just use the app tray for a couple of quick starting, desktop running programs, which I could just as easily throw shortcuts to on my desktop.

The apps are difficult to use effectively, so, I just don't use any of them.

... with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

I'm still using Windows 7. I've made some tests and it seems the performance of Win8 is either the same or slightly worse (98-99%) for some programs, so, there's no actual reason to use it as a long as the programs/hw don't drop support.However, I'd like the programs/hw I use to support Linux, unfortunately they don't and I don't like to use Wine/VMs (although I do use VMs for testing/etc., but using them to run Win programs on Linux is not acceptable imho).Unfortunately, due the nature of Linux that probably will never happen. I believe that someday they will revamp the code and push Windows to the next level of performance, because compared to Linux it's not good (things like memory/thread management are way behind).

So, for now I'm waiting for Windows 9.I just find ridiculous that people often say that I don't like Win8 because it's new, and people only like what they are used to, etc., etc... well, if people think the solely fact it's 'newer' automatically and irrefutably means it's 'better', they are really retard, because in terms of hw that rule may even make *some* sense, but in terms of software it doesn't. Better is better and newer is newer.

eternalfrost wrote:If you don't already explicitly know the name of a setting you want, you can't use the search bar to find it.

Going to be the obnoxious Ubuntu Unity fan and say that fuzzy searching is the bomb for this sort of thing. Start to type mon... and Displays comes up, because Displays is tagged with "monitors" somewhere. Works in the Alt menus for applications, too. Love it.

While I'm at it, I love big, shiny start screens with big, friendly buttons. You can't be interacting with anything else on the screen while you're in the apps menu, so why not make use of the screen space? And having my recent files listed right under my most-used applications before I start typing ... it's handy. All the benefits of a horribly disorganized mess of a desktop, yet I keep my wallpaper clean.

both of these are horrible. fuzzy search is totally unpredictable, to the point where the same query may give different results today and tomorrow, making any quick interaction impossible (like typing a few characters and hitting enter because you know that what you want is always the first, highlighted term).

distributing things from a compact list over a 27'' screen is a horror of its own. probably funded by mouse manufacturers and orthopaedists.

It's a touchpad, though. Not a touchscreen. And yes, much graphics work is best served using a drawing tablet, while some tasks require mice (typesetting and vector graphics come to mind for me.) For navigating the OS or simple browsing, e-mail, etc., I find mice extremely cumbersome, and would generally rather keep my hands near the keyboard than have to drop everything to go get the mouse and wiggle it around just to pop open a menu or click a "Submit" button after typing up a reply to someone talking about mice on the internet.

Any task that requires a lot of typing, the mouse can stay in its baggie.

So much depends upon a red wheel barrow (>= XXII) but it is not going to be installed.

Copper Bezel wrote:It's a touchpad, though. Not a touchscreen. And yes, much graphics work is best served using a drawing tablet, while some tasks require mice (typesetting and vector graphics come to mind for me.) For navigating the OS or simple browsing, e-mail, etc., I find mice extremely cumbersome, and would generally rather keep my hands near the keyboard than have to drop everything to go get the mouse and wiggle it around just to pop open a menu or click a "Submit" button after typing up a reply to someone talking about mice on the internet.

Any task that requires a lot of typing, the mouse can stay in its baggie.

Isn't that what tab+enter and other keyboard shortcuts are for? Also, I've yet to find a non-Apple laptop whose touchpad isn't utter shite.

frezik wrote:Anti-photons move at the speed of dark

DemonDeluxe wrote:Paying to have laws written that allow you to do what you want, is a lot cheaper than paying off the judge every time you want to get away with something shady.

Copper Bezel wrote:I seem to luck out with trackpads. I didn't even check if this one was fully Linux-compatible when I bought the machine, and it behaved kinda fidgety under Windows, but it's damn smooth under Linux.

I do use Tab to jump between fields like any normal person, but rarely for buttons, since it's less predictable where I might end up focusing.

I should say that as much as I appreciate things like Tabbing between fields, I want my hardware and system to be able to deal with a badly designed application or website. If I'm making hardware choices based on the assumption that every interface I use is going to play nicely with me, something's wrong. For instance, if I'm grading an essay inside LibreOffice, I can do that exclusively using the keyboard; if I'm grading an essay inside Blackboard, the LMS a school I work with uses, the only way to place a comment is by clicking, and then obviously I type the comment. So I need to be able to very quickly select a spot, type into it, and select the next - something that goes a hell of a lot faster if I don't bother with a mouse and can just orient my wrist a little differently to make use of the trackpad.

So much depends upon a red wheel barrow (>= XXII) but it is not going to be installed.

I'm disgusted with Windows 8, and further, I think the covert downloading of ~6GB of "updates" in the background on Windows 7 machines followed by an extraordinarily persistent, almost unremovable nag box to suggest upgrading to Windows 10, is more evidence that Microsoft doesn't play nice with people who actually want to be in charge of their computers.

For my own use I have Mac OS 10.7.4, which I never plan to upgrade, and I have virtual boxes running CentOS 6 and 7, and Ubuntu 14.04, for testing and other purposes.

If I replace my iPod I'll probably do it with an Android phone (maybe a Nexus?) and if/when this computer finally dies...although I have two full bootable backups made with CarbonCopyCloner...I'm not sure what I'll do. I do love Apple hardware (for one thing their trackpads are better than anyone else's) but I don't like Apple or Microsoft deciding how I MUST do things on my computer.

Also, I once had to help a friend print something on a Windows 8 machine, and it took me about 30 minutes to figure it out and make it work. PITA.